>On Behalf Of Brett Knowlton
> I've read a lot of your posts now, and most of the time I either
> agree with
> you or am forced to think about an issue more carefully. With the one
> exception of the Kosovo situation. For some reason you put blinders on
> when this topic comes up.
I appreciate the kind words and I know, for whatever reasons, my position on Kosovo puts me at odds with the overwhelming number of people on this list. But that doesn't mean I have blinders on; I think that discussions where disagreements are deep end up with more communication at cross purposes.
But let's go through this one:
> Sam's point was not to compare Milo to Daniel Ortega, or even to say that
> the situation (what was going on and how the US should have responded) in
> Nicaragua in the 80's was analogous to Kosovo in the 90's. His point was
> to illustrate the way in which the US elite (the Administration, the
> Pentagon, etc.) will manipulate the public in order to sway public opinion
> in the direction it wants it to go. Want to interfere in Nicaragua's
> election? Leak stories about the Russians selling Migs to the
> Sandinistas.
> Want to bomb Kosovo? Play up stories of missing Albanian men in Kosovo
> and spread all the dirt you can find about Milosevic all over the papers.
> This is not a difficult point to grasp, and yet I've never seen you deal
> with it head on.
The dispute here is whether what Reagan did with the Contras is even analogous to what was done in Kosovo. Everyone seeks to play up facts that support their position. Yes, that is propaganda. And there is no policy done by any government on earth that fails to do so. So if that is the point, it's not even interesting enough to discuss.
The question is whether there are forms of such argumentation that are considered illegitimate "manipulation" as opposed to reasonable pursuasion using the facts that support the action. The policy justifying Contra support was based on a whole series of flat out lies and distortion of facts, distortions that human rights groups continually documented.
In the case of Kosovo, I think it is the rhetoric on this list continually citing the 100,000 figure that is the distortion and is itself a form of propaganda. Yes, certain officials did mention that 100,000 refugees were unaccounted for and raised the possibility of their murder, but the official NATO and United Nations estimates remained at 10,000.
And those fears about missing people was not picked out of the air, but was based on human rights reports coming out during that period. As importantly to this discussion, the numbers debate was not what was motivating public opinion (since support for intervention did not actually change all that much during the conflict), but the more general sense that the US had ignored slaughter after slaughter in Bosnia. It was not accusations against Milosevic in this conflict that mobilized support, but documentation of abuse by Milosevic in the past -- in that sense, the debate on LM is more relevant than this 100,000 number debate.
And if anything during the war mobilized political support for the intervention, it was not speculation on deaths, but the pictures broadcast on television of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the country. If you want to analyze propaganda in the war, you have to argue that Milosevic made an insanely bad decision to expel so many people so quickly. That cameras were waiting to greet the refugees, when so many other refugee crises may be ignored, is worth comment, but the reality of that refugee crisis was undeniable and built real political support for intervention.
And going back to the comparison with Nicaragua, there were no comparable pictures for Reagan to show on TV because the Sandinistas never committed atrocities that led to such mass refugee problems or left mass graves scattered across the country. So Reagan had to lie about manufactured threats, shadowy CIA photos, and other lies. That truth difference is not a minor fact, but a crucial difference in analyzing the character of "manipulation" between Reagan in regards to the Sandinistas versus NATO in regards to Kosovo.
But let's go back to the question of why the idea of "missing people" and mass deaths were credible. Aside, of course, from the reasonable view that since Milosevic had supported mass slaughter in the past, a repeat performance was not out of the question:
Which takes us to the human rights reports being issued during the conflict:
> I don't remember these reports, but you could very well be
> correct. Still,
> there is virtually no way Human Rights Watch or any other human rights
> group could know what was going on inside Kosovo or the simple reason that
> all observers had been kicked out. True, many of these estimates were
> coming from the refugee stories, but this is still a lot different than
> being on the ground inside Kosovo and being able to observe what was
> actually happening.
That such refugee reports may not be as accurate as on-the-spot reports is obvious. However, that is a separate issue from whether they, rather than some kind of NATO manipulation, were the source of fears over missing and possibly murdered Kosovars. Whether they were accurate or not, they were the source of legitimate fears of mass murder, not NATO made-up propaganda. For those progressives committed to intervention, those were the cues motivating support.
Here is one such report from Human Rights Watch that raised the alarm about possible mass killings:
KOSOVO HUMAN RIGHTS FLASH #16 VIOLENT ETHNIC CLEANSING IN DAKOVICA (New York, April 3, 1999, 10:00am EST) -- Evidence began mounting Friday, April 2, that a violent form of ethnic cleansing is in its final stages in Dakovica (Gjakove in Albanian), an Albanian-majority city with approximately 100,000 inhabitants on the road between Pec and Prizren. In a marked departure from the forced depopulations that have taken place over the last week in large cities such as Pristina, Pec and Prizren, Dakovica appears to have experienced violence above and beyond the forced depopulation techniques described in other locales (See Human Rights Watch Flash #9). Today, thousands of refugees flowed into Krume from Dakovica, saying that the town had been largely emptied overnight. Unlike the urban forced depopulations in Pec and Prizren studied by Human Rights Watch in recent days, the Dakovica refugees recalled seeing large numbers of corpses lying in the city streets. Refugees spoke of clusters of corpses numbering one to six in each cluster. In addition, the refugees from Dakovica all reported that large numbers of families had suffered at least one execution in their homes. The testimonies given by Dakovica refugees strongly suggest that the level of violence experienced in that town is higher than in other Kosovo urban centers....Many of the Dakovica refugees arrived without men aged between twenty and fifty...Human Rights Watch is particularly worried about areas such as Dakovica where the men have been left behind...In some past instances, Serbian and Yugoslav forces have executed ethnic Albanian men of fighting age."
And despite all the attempts to downplay the numbers killed, there are still many missing young men; from a recent article:
"Six months after the end of the Kosovo conflict, not a single man from 16 to 60 in this ethnic Albanian village has been accounted for, residents and human- rights activists say. Its population used to be 600. 'We don't know if they are alive or dead,' said Hateme Kameri, whose husband Rrustem was last seen being beaten by Serb paramilitaries when they raided the village April 27. 'We still have hope that the men are in prisons.'(December 24, 1999, Globe and Mail)
> >I am very glad that those worries ended up being false, and for
> me it makes
> >the intervention all the more justified, since autonomy for Kosovo was
> >achieved with far fewer deaths than either supporters or opponents of
> >intervention thought likely.
>
> This I don't understand at all. Kosovo may be autonomous, but the avarage
> Kosovar has little voice in the politics of the region. Either
> KFOR or the
> KLA is running the show, depending on where you live. Secondly, less
> carnage inflicted by the Serbs makes the relative damage caused by NATO
> that much more significant and in my mind argues AGAINST intervention,
> especially in light of the fact that the repression increased
> significantly
> when the bombing campaign commenced (as was also predicted).
On the level of civilian deaths caused by NATO, it is the Milosevic regime who engaged most deliberately in distorting numbers they had full knowledge about, yet chose to distort for propaganda purposes. Human Rights Watch estimates only 500 civilians were killed by NATO and notes the ways the Milosevic regime distorted the numbers:
"The confirmed number of deaths is considerably smaller than Yugoslav public estimates. The post-conflict casualty reports of the Yugoslav government vary but coincide in estimating a death toll of at least some 1,200 and as many as 5,000 civilians. At the lower end, this is more than twice the civilian death toll of around 500 that Human Rights Watch has been able to verify. In one major incident-Dubrava prison in Kosovo-the Yugoslav government attributed ninety-five civilian deaths to NATO bombing. Human Rights Watch research in Kosovo determined that an estimated nineteen prisoners were killed by NATO bombs on May 21 (three prisoners and a guard were killed in an earlier attack on May 19), but at least seventy-six prisoners were summarily executed by prison guards and security forces subsequent to the NATO attack."(CIVILIAN DEATHS IN THE NATO AIR CAMPAIGN Human Rights Watch February 2000)
There are plenty of problems with KFOR and KLA governance, but the fact remains that the Kosovo population overwhelmingly supported intervention and given how much people downplay the repression under Milosevic, it seems a bit much to go too far in condemning governance abuses that Kosovars themselves find much preferable to their previous oppression.
The Serbs remaining in Kosovar have much greater grounds for complaint, but given that many of them participated in burning the homes (and sometimes the families) of the returning refugees, expecting sweetness and light in the immediate postwar period is a bit much as well. There is not moral equivalence between aggressors and those responding to that aggression, even if it takes the unpleasant form of revenge killings - note measured in the dozens, not the thousands as was done against the Kosovars. The KLA leadership has denounced the killings that have occurred, but there are obviously a lot of local groups unwilling to follow those instructions. But dozens of Serb deaths is not equivalent to the thousands of Kosovars killed before the NATO intervention, much less the larger numbers killed during the war.
The fact is that if we are judging results by the goals of the Kosovar population, there is no credible argument that the situation has not improved for them, both by objective measures and by their expressed satisfaction with the results of the NATO intervention.
The arguments against intervention have to focus on the effects of the war on the Serb population, both in Kosovo and Serbia, or on the broader critique that the war was bad because it strengthened NATO's hegemonic power, which will cause bad problems in the future. But on its own terms, in improving the situation of the Kosovar population, the NATO intervention was more successful than either its proponents or opponents predicted was possible.
-- Nathan Newman